


a dream pang

by athenasdragon



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Claustrophobia, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Supernatural Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-29 19:42:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17209766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athenasdragon/pseuds/athenasdragon
Summary: Two decades after the Wood Queen has been put to rest, the Dragon is looking forward to celebrating the harvest with Agnieszka after a summer spent apart, but something is wrong. She is not herself--her energy wanes with the summer, and by winter he is forced to send her away with Kasia while he searches for the source of her mysterious illness.Inspired by Robert Frost's poem "A Dream Pang"





	a dream pang

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Neverlong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neverlong/gifts).



> I had withdrawn in forest, and my song  
> Was swallowed up in leaves that blew alway;  
> And to the forest edge you came one day  
> (This was my dream) and looked and pondered long,  
> But did not enter, though the wish was strong:  
> You shook your pensive head as who should say,  
> ‘I dare not—too far in his footsteps stray—  
> He must seek me would he undo the wrong.’
> 
> Not far, but near, I stood and saw it all  
> Behind low boughs the trees let down outside;  
> And the sweet pang it cost me not to call  
> And tell you that I saw does still abide.  
> But ’tis not true that thus I dwelt aloof,  
> For the wood wakes, and you are here for proof.
> 
> \- Robert Frost, "A Dream Pang"

Autumn was always a busy time in the Dragon’s tower. Over the years, Agnieszka had dragged him out to dance at more and more harvest festivals across the Valley, and then there was the matter of collecting the towns’ tributes. Seven years after Agnieszka was chosen, the people of the Valley lined up their daughters as usual, unsure whether the tradition had truly passed into history; their witch embraced them each and presented them with vials of dust to sprinkle over the earth before the first snowfall in order to ensure a plentiful harvest the following spring. The Dragon Girls were born blessed, now, not cursed.

This year marked the twenty-first since Agnieszka was whisked away from Dvernik and the Dragon smiled in spite of himself when the leaves began to turn. He and Agnieszka were not always together—business had kept him away in [capital] for most of the summer, and she had extended her benevolent reach far into the Wood—but when the apples ripened and the wheat was bound, he could close his eyes and see the flash of the bonfire on her hair and the imprints of her bare feet in the cool grass, hear her laughter like a spell commanding him to dance with her.

He leaned out the library window, spellbook forgotten where it lay open on the table, and breathed deeply of the first cool evening. Soon the mornings would be thick with fog from the Spindle, but today the harvest was barely begun; he could see motion all over the valley as the farmers drove home carts heaping with their first week’s bounty. Farther still, at the edge of the Wood, he could see the lights of torches as a few straggling gatherers emerged from the dusky forest with baskets full of mushrooms and kindling. He scoured the tree line for a trace of smoke from Agnieszka’s cottage, trying to pretend that he didn’t care much whether she had returned to her home—and that he certainly had no intention of paying her a visit if she had.

“If you lean much farther you’ll fall out.”

He whirled around at the familiar voice and had to fight down a grin when he found Agnieszka standing just a few feet behind him. Instead he arched one brow as he pulled a leaf from her hair, taking in the dirt caked onto her dress and bare feet. “You look like you fell out of a tree and into my library.”

She smiled back and reached out to wipe a streak of mud onto his jerkin with one grimy hand. “You look like you haven’t left your library in months.”

He caught her wrist and took half a step closer, bringing them chest to chest. He opened his mouth, closed it absently when he realized he could smell the sun on her skin, and opened it again. “You look like you nested under a log for the summer.”

“And you’re as pale as a grub under a log,” she laughed.

“Oh, you—” He cut himself off as he pulled her against him and caught her mouth with his. She was still laughing into the kiss as she threw her arms around his waist and lifted him off the ground and spun him a little, every touch pouring pure joy into him as real as any magic. He grumbled when she set him down and made a show of dusting himself off, but when she touched his face and whispered his name, there was suddenly nothing he could do besides hold her tight and press his face into her neck and whisper hers back.

 

Ostensibly the Dragon was reading Agnieszka’s notes from her summer foray into the depths of the Wood, but really he was stealing so many glances at her where she sat at the table that he was catching few words in between. She had a pile of flowers at one elbow and she was weaving them into crowns for that year’s Dragon Girls, enchanting each one as she finished it so that the blossoms turned to living silver. It was an extraordinarily complicated spell, but she seemed to be accomplishing it simply by trailing her finger around the circlet and humming at it.

He was not merely watching for her beauty or her dexterous spellwork, however. There was a hint of pallor in her cheeks that concerned him. It might be the autumn chill working its fingers into her—but then again, she had been sleeping like the dead and later into the morning than usual, and he could not shake the worry that there was something else wrong.

Finally she caught him looking and smiled. “Going to critique my form, are you?”

“Since you asked,” he said, snapping the notebook shut and going to stand behind her. He watched as she used her fingernails to make careful slits in the stems and threaded the next flower through, one after the next until they formed a complete circle. When she hummed her spell and silver spread across the green like ice, he realized what she was doing: rather than living silver, she was turning the flowers silver in color and simultaneously casting a preservation spell.

He grunted. “Clever, but not as impressive as living silver.”

“A crown of living silver is more trouble than it’s worth. With these and a handful of enchanted seeds they’ll be more than satisfied.” Agnieszka leaned back so that her head rested against his chest and smiled up at him, but the expression seemed tired.

The Dragon frowned. “Are you feeling unwell? I could make you something if you’re ill.”

She reached up and pulled him down for an upside-down kiss. “I’m fine,” she murmured against his lips. “It was a long summer—I’ll be fine after some rest.”

“Very well,” he replied eventually, and pressed a series of kisses over her cool temple and forehead.

 

As the autumn progressed, so did Agnieszka’s mysterious illness. It began with more of those afternoons in the library, fiddling idly with some piece of spellwork or other when she would usually have been out in the Wood or helping her family with the harvest. The Dragon watched her over his books and said nothing when she went upstairs to lie down for an hour in the afternoon even though she had slept almost until lunch. Of course she would say something if she needed his help. Of course it was nothing serious. How could it be? She was Agnieszka of Dvernik. She would be fine.

At Dvernik’s harvest festival, Agnieszka sat on the grass wrapped in a shawl while the Dragon presented the gifts to the girls. They were too young to remember the time when being a Dragon Girl was anything besides an honor; they smiled at him as he placed the silver circlets on their heads and dipped into grateful curtseys.

The Dragon walked over to Agnieszka when the ceremony was finished and offered her his hand. She took it—hers was cold—and pulled herself to her feet, but immediately stumbled forwards into his arms. He held her steady and hid his pained expression over her shoulder.

“I’m fine,” she reassured him, but she stepped back and sat back down on the grass. “We can dance in Olshanka next week.”

He took her hand in both of his, ignoring the curious eyes of the villagers around them. “Of course.”

 

They did not dance in Olshanka the next week. The Dragon went alone to collect the town’s tribute and returned quickly to rejoin Agnieszka in the library. She barely looked up from the fire when he ran a hand through her hair and asked how she felt.

“Agnieszka,” he insisted, forcing a firmness into his voice until it came out harsh—the verdant freshness of her name creeping out around the sharpness. “You have to tell me what is wrong.”

She looked at him then, brown eyes crinkled with badly-disguised worry. His heart squeezed painfully as she reached up to take his hand in hers. “I don’t know. I feel… tired. Not ill. Just tired.”

“I’ll find out,” he said with more certainty than he felt. “I’ll help you.”

 

Before anything else, he wrote to Kasia. His letter was brief and entreating; he wondered after he sent it if his fear showed too clearly, but there was no time to worry about that now. There was no time to worry at all, he told himself—worry is only wasted energy leaking from the cracks of an inefficient mind—but, as always when it came to Agnieszka, he had trouble following his own advice.

Each morning he brought her up food from the kitchen, conjured with _lirintalem_ out of the ingredients he was not skilled enough to prepare by hand, and sat and ate with her as the weak autumn sunlight warmed their room. (He wondered if she would sleep better alone in her old room, but in the end he decided she should stay with him. She might need him in the night, he told himself, ignoring the way his own fretting kept him awake until he curled tight around her.) Then he helped her down the stairs to the library, where she could sit before the fire, wrapped in blankets and with a pile of food and scrolls beside her to keep her occupied through the late morning.

She smiled when he asked if she would be all right by herself—laughed when he came back a few minutes later under the pretense of asking for a more detailed description of her symptoms. The light still sparkled in her dark eyes. For a few moments at a time, it was easy to forget that she was ill as she mocked him for his fastidiousness. Then disappointment would flash across her face as she tried and failed to warm the drink in her hands and he would remember. Each remembering was as bitter as the original discovery.

Between sleep and meals, all of the Dragon’s time was spent in his laboratory, paging through spells and annotations, combing through his extensive store of ingredients and talismans for anything that might help. He tried Groshno’s minor charms, remembering with somber amusement his one-time assurance that Agnieszka was predisposed towards the healing disciplines. She reassured him that the charms left her feeling fresh, her breathing easy—but they did not cure her. He moved on to more obscure tomes, returning to the library every few hours to swap out his books and persuade Agnieszka to sit still while he chanted or gestured or plied her with potions and poultices.

He even tried one of Jaga’s workings: the top of the page indicated that it was meant for “warming things gone long-cold.” He brought a bowl full of the appropriate herbs upstairs and ignited them with a word, instructing Agnieszka to breathe the smoke.

After several deep breaths, she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s helping. Oh! But my tea is hot again!”

He kissed her forehead and forced a smile.

 

Ten days after he sent his letter to Kralia, the Dragon looked out the window and spotted a messenger bearing the royal crest riding hard down the road towards the Tower, their mount’s hooves kicking up clods of frozen dirt. He went down to meet them and was startled to see that they were not a messenger at all: the royal crested cloak was swept aside to reveal a suit of practical leather armor, and when the rider put down their hood, their hair gleamed gold as the sun above a determined wood-grained face.

“Kasia?” The name came out as a question, though the answer was clearly dismounting before him. Like Agnieszka, the Captain of the King’s guard had barely aged in two decades—a side effect of her transformation in the Wood. She still stood imposingly tall, almost a head over the Dragon.

“Sarkan. Any changes?” She didn’t wait for an answer as she raced past him and inside.

He hurried to match her longer stride. “She’s still getting worse. Nothing I’ve tried has worked, and she doesn’t have any more idea what’s going on. I think—I think whatever it is may be clouding her mind. She seems content to spend her days by the library fire.”

Kasia half-ran up the coiled staircase and stopped cold in the doorway to the library. The Dragon could see his own painted smile reflected in her expression as she grinned at Agnieszka. “Hello darling! How are you feeling?”

“Kasia!” Agnieszka’s eyes brightened and she threw aside her blanket and stood, then tripped on nothing and fell forward.

Kasia moved faster than the Dragon could even think to react, darting forward and catching Agnieszka under her arms to keep her from landing hard on hands and knees. “Careful there—careful. Let’s sit back down. Wonderful.” She resettled Agnieszka, who was still beaming, in her chair, and crouched before her. “Sarkan wrote and said that you weren’t feeling well. What’s wrong?”

“Is that why you came all the way from Kralia? It’s nothing serious. I overdid things this summer and I’m a little tired, that’s all.” She wrapped her arms around Kasia and hugged her close. “It’s so wonderful to see you. Will you stay long?”

“Actually, I was hoping that you might come back to Kralia with me. We can look through the palace library for anything that might help you, and Alosha and Solya can examine you.”

The Dragon bristled. “I have already examined her, and she is too weak to make the journey besides.”

Kasia continued speaking to Agnieszka, ignoring him. “And when we’ve found something to help bring your energy back, we can go on to Gidna and you can rest at the seaside. Doesn’t that sound nice? You worked so hard in the Wood all summer, and now you can spend a few weeks recovering in the sea air.”

“It does sound nice,” Agnieszka said slowly, “but I don’t want to leave the Valley for so long.”

“We’ll bring stores of water from the Spindle. And the Dragon will be here to keep everyone safe, to watch the Wood. You’ll be back well before midwinter.”

Of course, it made sense that he would stay here. He was the Lord of the Valley, after all. But the thought of Kasia spiriting Agnieszka off to the capital for so long felt like a blow to his chest. He tried to keep back the worry that her condition might deteriorate, that he might never—no. No time for that.

“All right. I’ll come.” Agnieszka smiled at Kasia, then the Dragon. “It’s probably time for Solya’s twice-yearly ego check.”

That startled a laugh out of him, which gave him enough time to step out of the room (“I’ll begin packing”) before his face crumpled.

 

He had thought that it would get easier the longer Agnieszka was gone, but he was wrong. It was a full fortnight into her absence that he woke with a start in the middle of the night, convinced that she had wandered off and fallen somewhere in the Tower. He got as far as lighting a candle and throwing open the door before he remembered that he was alone with the silent stone walls.

Kasia wrote to him every few days, of course. Their journey was quick and uneventful; they missed the first snowfall of the season by a few short weeks. Neither Solya nor Alosha were able to figure out what was wrong, although Alosha had forged Agnieszka a pendant infused with fire heart to keep her warm and alert. One letter even arrived with a postscript from King Stashek reassuring the Dragon that all available resources would be directed towards restoring the powerful witch’s help.

In the meantime, the Tower felt emptier than it had ever been, even in the century before Agnieszka had joined him. He missed her everywhere and for every reason. She should have been baking bread to bring to the villagers whose hunger would be greatest during the winter, she should have been reordering his books when he was gone from the room, she should have been leaving plates and goblets for him to discover wherever she got distracted from her meal.

Not for the first time since he had met her, he felt helpless. This was not the bemused helplessness of watching her laugh at him and finding himself smitten instead of angry, however; this helplessness was heavy and dull, the ultimate intellectual failing in addition to emotional hardship. He had not been able to figure out what was wrong with her (and he still could not, despite the hours he continued to devote to increasingly obscure research).

He went by her cottage to close it up for the winter and found himself sitting on her bed, staring at the cold hearth and imagining her room at the palace. She was probably more comfortable than he could make her—more comfortable than she would have been here, anyway. He had never been able to understand her desire to have moss and leaves sprouting on the _inside_ of her home.

Even so, he could feel her magic here. It hung from the ceiling in strands that tangled about him as soon as he crossed the threshold; it seeped up from the earthen floor until it felt as though it would consume him. It was tortuous and comforting at once to feel her so close when in reality she was so far.

His thoughts were interrupted by a tapping at the window that made him jump. He looked up to see a walker peering in at him, its head tilted to one side like an inquisitive hound. Scowling, he pulled his coat around him and stomped to the door.

“She’s not here. You’ll have to find food for yourself.” The walker looked at him again and tilted its head to the other side. “Ridiculous creature. You probably don’t know how anymore.” He stepped outside with some vague idea of finding Agnieszka’s store of heart fruit and tossing one to the spindly walker, but as soon as he left the cottage, it skittered towards him and then backed away, tilting its head once more towards a narrow path which wound away behind the cottage and into the Wood.

“That way?”

It started off down the path, looking back every few steps to see if he was following.

“Fine, very well. I don’t suppose I’m doing anything else.”

 

A few cold minutes of walking later, the walker led him into an open clearing with a heart tree at the center. The silver bark gleamed in the failing afternoon light and the Dragon couldn’t suppress a shudder at the memory of that bark closing over his skin.

He sighed. “This is what you wanted to show me? I don’t know how Agnieszka cleanses them. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for her to come back.” He felt heavy now, as though there was a great weight resting on his shoulders, urging him to curl up in the leaf litter at his feet and rest his eyes.

That was ridiculous, of course—he was wallowing too much. He simply needed to return to the Tower and eat supper. But the walker still stood there staring at him, its dark inhuman eyes flitting back and forth between him and the tree.

On a second look, there did appear to be something different about it. It didn’t look corrupted, nor could he detect the Wood Queen’s twisted magic anywhere in the clearing, but the leaves were dull and brownish and the branches drooped.

“What’s wrong with it?” he asked aloud before he remembered that his only companion was the walker. Deprived of Agnieszka’s insight, he stifled another sigh and pointed at the tree. “Do you know what caused this?”

The walker shuffled back and forth a few times before starting off deeper into the Wood. The Dragon followed reluctantly.

 

At last the walker left him in a clearing he knew well, even if he had only been here once before. The Spindle fed into a wide, still pool, and reflected in the water was the heart tree that held the Wood Queen and her sister.

“Something here killed that tree?” he asked, and then turned to realize that the walker had run off. He grumbled to himself as he pushed up his sleeves and looked around, wary but so far not noticing any danger. It was then that he noticed that the other heart trees in the grove looked similarly sick. One had even come crashing down at the edge of the clearing, its leaves shriveled and limp.

The heart tree which stood over the pool seemed perfectly healthy when he looked at it first. He stepped cautiously over the stream and around its trunk, peering up at the foliage to see whether it showed any signs of decay. He didn’t know what it would mean for the Wood to fall ill—perhaps it was related to Agnieszka’s illness, he realized. Her magic was so bound up in the Wood and the Valley that it was entirely possible that the health of one would affect the other.

His first inspection found no injury to the queen’s tree, but on a second pass he noticed a narrow cleft in the trunk just below chest height. When he ducked down to peer inside, he saw masses of a slimy green-silver mold—

“Eating it from the inside,” he murmured aloud. Even without Agnieszka’s expertise, he could tell that there was no magic in the thing. It was a mundane blight, similar to the rot that sometimes plagued the crops in other regions of Polnya. He stepped back and looked up at the tree, subconsciously searching for a face to examine. “So what have you been doing, crafty Queen?”

He pressed his palm to the bark and closed his eyes, mirroring the way he had seen Agnieszka evaluate dozens of heart trees through the years, and felt a little foolish when he felt nothing besides the tickle of a spider crawling over his thumb.

Breath fogging as he huffed out a cantrip to protect himself against the evening’s growing chill, he stepped back and used his feet to scrape away the layers of moss and dead leaves in a large circle around the trunk. The weariness which had been weighing on him since he stepped into the forest was growing heavier by the second; it felt like the easiest thing would be to lie down in the earth and sleep.

 _And dirty your coat?_ He could almost hear Agnieszka’s teasing laugh and it shocked him slightly more awake as he picked up a stick and began scratching runes into the ground. He focused on the image of her laughing, cheeks flushed with color, her hand warm in his, and his desperate need to see her so once more helped to keep him upright—he couldn’t be sure that he had found the key to her illness, but the eerie quiet of the grove was all too similar to her own silence as she had weakened. Shuffling backwards as he went, he made his way around the trunk, connecting his sigils in three concentric circles only occasionally interrupted by stray roots.

The dirt was cool and damp against his skin as he crouched and planted a hand at the edge of the outermost circle. He wished he had brought the relevant spellbook with him; he had a better memory for shapes than for words, and while he was confident in his diagram, he would have liked to refresh the incantation. No time now.

The words came easier than he had worried they would, after all, even if his foot went to sleep halfway through and he had to adjust so that he was kneeling and the damp seeped through the knees of his trousers. The runes seemed to writhe and shift as he poured magic into them, flickering in the watery afternoon light. Droplets of golden energy materialized above the circles and elongated into threads, stretching from the outside in to the heart tree’s trunk. The Dragon may not have had the same intuitions as Agnieszka, but he could guess very well that they each pointed to the dying trees he had encountered on his walk through the Wood.

Another thread appeared, this one the color of crushed berries; it was thicker than the others and pointed unmistakably towards Kralia. As his incantation ended, the Dragon trailed his finger through it and recognized the flavor of Agnieszka’s magic.

(Far away, wrapped in a blanket and rocking idly in a chair in a palace chamber, a witch startled upright for the first time in weeks.)

He was unsurprised to see a narrower blue thread pointing directly at himself. So this was the Wood Queen’s game, then: sapping energy from every source she could reach in an attempt to save herself and her sister. Agnieszka must have been an easy target, wrapped up in the Valley as her magic was. He shuddered to think of how careful they had been two decades previously, worried about one or the other of them falling prey to the Wood’s corruption and contributing to its power, when apparently distance made no difference to its ability to siphon their magic.

“Your game hasn’t changed then,” he said, too exhausted to find it ridiculous that he was speaking to a tree. “You’re willing to drain what you need from others, no matter the cost?” He stood and put his hand back against the trunk. “I may be able to help you, but you have to let Agnieszka go. She takes good care of the Wood, against my best advice—you’re only making it worse for your people.”

His heart seemed to stop as the silver bark enveloped his hand, quick as a flash.

He tugged hard, bracing with his other hand to pull without thinking—bark crawled over that, too, trapping him with both hands against the tree and making his bones creak as he continued to pull with all his might.

“Let me go,” he snarled, his breathing going ragged against his will as he watched the silver spiral up his arm like Agnieszka’s enchanted flowers. “I’m trying to help you—”

“You are trying to help your love,” the Wood Queen’s voice said softly at the back of his mind. His skin crawled as he tried to push back the memory of the last time he had heard that voice. “You would let me die, I know. You care not for the forest. But you care for her, and she cares for me.”

“You don’t care for the forest either,” the Dragon gasped, resisting the urge to plant his foot against the trunk and push, “if you’re willing to drain its life to save your own.”

“This is not my wish. I would be happy to let the forest thrive, and the witch with it. She has been kind.”

An image flooded his mind of Agnieszka cleansing a heart tree and resting her hand against its trunk, smiling. Seeing her healthy and happy sent a pain through his chest even in the midst of his panic that the Wood Queen could invade his mind so easily.

She sent him another image, this one of Agnieszka pale and thin and staring absently out a window, the air filled with the clamor and dust of the city. Kasia stood behind her looking worried.

“You have more than enough power for me to heal my home, Dragon. The fire which fuels your magic will keep my sister and my people safe and healthy through many winters, and your love will see the next year arrive strong and in good health. Is this not what you want?” The image faded and he could see his encased arms for the length of a breath, and then his sight was obscured by the bark crawling over his face. “You fear what I will do with your power, but I have no more need for revenge. For conquest. I am content to stay here, just are content to remain in your tower. Is this so different? You may watch over your Valley and protect the witch from here. Your reach will be extended further than you could ever achieve on your own.”

He would have responded, but when he tried to draw a breath he found his mouth clamped shut. His chest burned as he tried again, and again. She gave him no chance to reply.

 

Things were different for a long time. Slow. Damp and sweet and warm, cramped and claustrophobic. The moments of flickering, terrified awareness became fewer and farther between. He was not alone, but the two others were not trapped like he was. They were a part of the place where he was, and their murmured conversations were barely felt at the edges of his perception.

After a while, he found that he could tell when birds lighted in the tree’s branches. He could not see them, exactly, nor could he feel them—but he knew that they were there all the same, just as he could tell that some small animal burrowed around the roots. The Spindle had its own sensation as it seeped through the earth: a little green, a little tart, a little like a major key.

By following the feeling of the Spindle he found that he could feel other parts of the Wood, too. He knew where each heart tree was—little points of familiarity in a crowd—and where the walkers directed their footsteps. He felt each snowfall, and he tasted the silence of the ice. There was some part of the Dragon still deep within him that wanted to tell Agnieszka that he almost understood what she meant about gleaning now, and was sad that he could not, but the part of him that observed his surroundings was barely aware of the other part.

It was impossible to tell how long passed like that, listening to the deep, low song of the slumbering forest and trying not to disturb the two entities with whom he shared the tree. It might have been an hour or a month or a century.

He was startled, then, when he knew suddenly that it was morning. He knew this because the trees at the edge of the Wood were whispering it to each other through the soil. And they knew because—because—

Because she was here.

Too far, still, for him to see, but the ripple of her presence washed through the Wood. She was known to the things that made their home here, and they loved her. She was back and it was morning and she carried her basket over her arm to collect the mushrooms which still grew under the roots.

The happiness of the Wood buoyed him higher and higher until suddenly he broke through some barrier of his own awareness and he shouted. She was singing her walking song, and the birds sang it back to her and to each other overhead, and they sang to him and he could taste her magic in it, and he shouted it back to her even though she had never been able to convince him to sing with her before.

And as he shouted the burning in his chest returned and the awareness of hard wood over his mouth. Panic gripped him, flashing white in his otherwise dark vision, and his weakened muscles twitched against the skin-tight casket which suspended him within the tree.

The tree! If she was back then the Wood was healed, it was awakening at her arrival and she was back to look for him. But awareness of himself had cost him his connection with the tree and he found that he could no longer reach out beyond its branches to feel where she was. He was trapped entirely within his body, and his body could not move even a fraction of an inch.

He couldn’t breathe.

It was another short eternity before he heard—really heard, with his human ears—a loud _crack_ and felt a hand gripping the front of his shirt and pulling.

Almost at once he fell forwards into the open air—and into Agnieszka, who caught him with both arms and lowered him down to the ground, wiping the sap from his face and speaking soothing words he could not yet understand. He gulped down air as he stared at her face, and at the sky.

She turned from him and held aloft something small and glowing, swinging on a chain, and he began to catch the meaning of her words as she spoke sternly to the heart tree in the same tone which one might use to chastise a pet caught with something in its mouth that would make it sick.

“…an entire wizard when one good spell would do just fine, and for _mold_? Greedy thing. Take this and be done with it.” She threw the glowing thing into the crack in the tree, which sealed itself back up in a matter of seconds.

Agnieszka knelt back down beside him and took his hand. “Sarkan? Sarkan, what do you need?”

He tried to speak but fell into a coughing fit instead; she pulled him against her as he hacked up all the sap which had found its way into his mouth and throat. He gripped her dress as tight as his shaking hands would allow and listened to her soothing, meaningless reassurances. When he was able to breathe at last, she helped him to sit upright and drink a few cupped handfuls of freezing cold Spindle water.

“Agnieszka,” he croaked at last, burying his face in her shoulder and fighting to hold back tears.

“Sarkan,” she said again, and held him tight. “Hold on, I’m going to take us back to the Tower.”

And she did, with a lurch that he had never really noticed before. The stinging cold of the Wood in winter, which he had barely noticed a few moments ago, was replaced with the more stagnant cool of the weeks-empty Tower.

“Sleep,” she whispered when he tried again to speak and was unable to form the syllables into words. “You’re safe. There will be time later.”

He did.

 

When he awoke, he was back in the darkness. It pressed in on him from all sides, pinning him down—he bolted upright with a hoarse shout, suddenly aware of cold sweat running down his face.

There was a rustling noise beside him and suddenly Agnieszka was visible, a ball of golden energy cupped in her hands. “You’re safe, it’s all right. You’re safe.” She stood and walked away from him, and he reached out towards her, unable to find the words to call her back, but then she ignited the fire in the grate and lit the candle on the table with two quick words and returned to him without him having to ask.

Only after she sat next to him and wrapped her arms around him did he begin to recognize his own bedroom. His legs were tangled in the bedsheets; he kicked them free and pressed closer to her.

“It’s all right, Sarkan. You’re safe. It’s all right.”

“I—I forgot where I was,” he explained, disappointed when his voice came out as a barely-audible croak.

She pushed him gently until he lay back down; she curled at his side, brushing her fingers through his hair, moving it away from his face. She eased her other hand into his and gripped it tight. “I know. The Wood Queen played a dirty trick, using you to heal herself when she didn’t need half as much magic. You’ll need a while to recover, I expect.”

The idea of recovery jogged his memory. “You’re back, you’re—you’re well again. It was the Wood?”

“It was the Wood,” she agreed. “I woke up in Kralia with Kasia trying to feed me broth. I barely remembered how I had gotten there—I still don’t remember much after Dvernik’s harvest. It took some explanations and a few days of regaining my strength before I was able to come back and tell you the good news. But of course, the Tower was empty when I arrived, and when no one from the Valley had heard from you I knew something was wrong.”

“How did you find me?” His nightmare panic was already receding, held at bay by the shapes of Agnieszka’s face in the firelight. Instead he felt exhausted, as though he was already drifting back to sleep.

She moved her hand down from his hair to stroke the side of his face. “I was going to my cottage to get the ingredients for Jaga’s finding spell, and as soon as I stepped under the first boughs I knew you were there. It was as though there was some part of the Wood, the familiar part, that was telling it to sleep and conserve and grow slowly through the winter, but there was another part that was restless and uneasy. It didn’t belong there. And then I knew that you had done something bold and idiotic in exchange for my health.”

He was too tired to acknowledge her teasing. “How did you convince her to let me go?”

“I didn’t. I took you. And _then_ I gave her the fire heart necklace Alosha gave me,” she added. “It’s a simple enchantment that should give her the energy to keep her sister and every one of her people healthy for the next century.”

He hummed an acknowledgement. “I love you.”

She chuckled and kissed his forehead, his nose. “I love you too. I was very frightened for you.”

“I was… frightened… first.” His eyelids began to slide shut without his permission.

Her voice reached him just as he tipped over the edge into sleep. “Then perhaps both of us should stay out of trouble for a good long while.”

 

Autumn was always a busy time in the Dragon’s tower. Over the years, Agnieszka had dragged him out to dance at more and more harvest festivals across the Valley, and then there was the matter of collecting the towns’ tributes. Agnieszka had her rounds to do in the Wood and the Dragon had meetings with the leaders of each town.

This year marked the twenty-second since Agnieszka was whisked away from Dvernik and the Dragon smiled in spite of himself when the leaves began to turn. It had been a long year; he had still not been strong enough to dance with Agnieszka at Dvernik’s spring festival. His magic had returned as slowly as his strength, leaving him frustrated and impotent for several months.

The summer, though—the summer had been marked by several weeks in Gidna with Kasia and the royal family, Agnieszka and Kasia taking the king’s young children to explore the tidepools while the Dragon and the Falcon bickered with no real fire in their words. When they had returned, he found that he finally felt his old self again, and he and Agnieszka had begun several ambitious workings to improve the strength of the Tower and connect the cellar doorway with a fresh door they installed in her cottage. Either could lock it from their side, but they left the connection open much more often than they either expected, and Agnieszka took to spending most nights at the Tower where the cool stone allowed for easy sleep even in the summer heat.

Now the heat was finally waning and the harvest was beginning across the Valley. The Dragon looked out at the flurry of activity from where he sat by the library window.

“Do you know,” he said finally, “I’m almost looking forward to the dancing this year. It’s been so long since the last time.”

Agnieszka looked up from the diagram she was refining: a soft barrier around the Wood Queen’s grove that would alert them if she ever tried to extend her reach beyond it again. “Sarkan, you’ve looked forward to the dancing every year for the last twenty years. Kasia told me that you wrote and asked where you could learn after that first harvest. Stop pretending to be a grumpy old man.”

The Dragon scoffed and looked back out the window to where the leaves deep within the Wood were beginning to turn gold.


End file.
